The 14th Came Early For VR-Zone

[apt403]

First post-NDA review AFAIK. 22 pages long, benchs, oc'ing, tons of pics.

http://www.vr-zone.com/?i=4946&s=1

[rainless]

Thanks for the post! :beer:

[Shell]

Damn! Beat me to it!

And it is the 14th... somewhere overseas.

Edit: :drool: Damn that's nice GDDR3.

[rainless]

Like here in Paris!

I'm convinced now: My next video card will be an 8800 GTS 640.

Cheaper than a 2900XT and the performance is pretty much on par. Might not overclock as well... but I never really overclock my video cards anyway. I believe it handles power consumption better, and that's very important to me.

[Shell]

I'm convinced now: My next video card will be an 8800 GTS 640.
Cheaper than a 2900XT and the performance is pretty much on par. Might not overclock as well... but I never really overclock my video cards anyway. I believe it handles power consumption better, and that's very important to me. Well for the average overclocker that can afford the energy, there's good reason to spend little more and go for the 2900... it's definitely the biggest bang for buck. Every benchmark that's not closer to the 8800GTX then the GTS-640Mb is because of the contraption being hindered by the CPU and the younge drivers.

WAHTT!?!?!?
http://img454.imageshack.us/img454/3211/vertexshaderoi7.png :eek: :drool:
I demand someone make use of this vertex shader power!
And why is the GTX going soo slow? Isn't the average around 135?

EDIT: TT died from traffic from their review... Here's an alternate:
http://www.fooo.info/?p=384

[rainless]

Well for the average overclocker that can afford the energy, there's good reason to spend little more and go for the 2900... it's definitely the biggest bang for buck. Every benchmark that's not closer to the 8800GTX then the GTS-640Mb is because of the contraption being hindered by the CPU and the younge drivers.

WAHTT!?!?!?

I demand someone make use of this vertex shader power!
And why is the GTX going soo slow? Isn't the average around 135?

EDIT: TT died from traffic from their review... Here's an alternate:
http://www.fooo.info/?p=384

Every bench the 2900XT is trailing far FAR behind the GTX and usually behind or even with even the 320 GTS... except in vertex shading I suppose.

And if it is CPU limited, then it shall REMAIN CPU limited for the foreseeable future... because if a quad core overclocked to four and a half gigahertz can't do it, then it simply won't be done for at least another two years or so.

I think even the 8600 series has more shaders than the 8800 series, but that's only to help balance out some of the 8800 series other advantages. It would be impressive if any games actually used all those shaders.

In terms of raw performance though, I suppose the 2900XT is where it should/was meant to be: right alongside the 8800GTS. But the 640 meg card can be found cheaper and the 320 card meg is even cheaper than that... though the lower memory will eventually lead you to performance issues.

All-in-all the 8800 GTS still winds up being the better deal... for now. I've seen other posts by this guy, and he's an absolute lunatic... you saw everything he did to get phase cooling on that thing. I doubt if most people here are going to go through the steps he did to get the thing overclocked to 1ghz. And, if they did, they could also do the same thing to overclock the 8800GTS.

[Burdman27911]

Thanks for the article. I'm feeling better about the R600 now, but it still has a good ways to go performance wise. There is at the very least a little more hope for the card. Just going from the 8.36 driver to the 8.37 they got an increase of 10.7% (in some game). What really interested me was their comment on the newer drivers they have yet to test:

As of time of testing, we did not have the latest build just issued out 3 days before NDA was lifted. We were running 8-37-4-070419a.

The latest 8.37.4.2_47323 drivers is supposed to implement a new intelligent algorithm that increases FPS while applying similar image quality when running Adaptive Anti-Aliasing. In Oblivion, performance several times faster than previous drivers using the new adaptive AA algorithm was claimed to have been acheived. New optimizations for HDR applications in general resulted in a 5-30% increase in performance.

The 8.37.4.2_47323 is actually a pre-alpha driver, but it includes a preview of new 12xAA and 24xAA modes. These modes use an advanced edge detection filter that delivers edge quality while eliminating blurring. The drivers are still very new and I'm sure there's room for improvement. 30% would sound great.

The biggest problem I see for the R600 is the 8800gts's price that has been falling. Last I checked (today), you can pick one up for $350 ($330 AR). I'm not sure if the R600 can compete with those prices, even if it's bundled with some good games.

I guess time will tell if performance will increase a significant amount with driver improvements. Unfortunately, I'm buying parts for a new PC this week or next, so I'll have to make a quick decision. Only wish someone would go into more detail with the noise of the card... that's a big selling point for me.

[Shell]

http://img167.imageshack.us/img167/7524/1175321905411jn0.jpg
Every bench the 2900XT is trailing far FAR behind the GTX and usually behind or even with even the 320 GTS... except in vertex shading I suppose.
If it's trailing soo far behind... Then how is the 2900 benching to be closer to the 8800GTX in performance in many of the displayed benchmarks?
And if it is CPU limited, then it shall REMAIN CPU limited for the foreseeable future... because if a quad core overclocked to four and a half gigahertz can't do it, then it simply won't be done for at least another two years or so.Well if that's such an issue for you; then why even bother with an 8800GTS 320Mb? :shrug: CPU - GPU, one is ahead of the other all the time.
I think even the 8600 series has more shaders than the 8800 series, but that's only to help balance out some of the 8800 series other advantages. It would be impressive if any games actually used all those shaders. What? Are you actually refering to the 2900's 320 units to the completely different architecture of the G80?
In terms of raw performance though, I suppose the 2900XT is where it should/was meant to be: right alongside the 8800GTS. But the 640 meg card can be found cheaper and the 320 card meg is even cheaper than that... though the lower memory will eventually lead you to performance issues.The 2900 was not made to tie with it's intended competition. ;)
All-in-all the 8800 GTS still winds up being the better deal... for now. I've seen other posts by this guy, and he's an absolute lunatic... you saw everything he did to get phase cooling on that thing. I doubt if most people here are going to go through the steps he did to get the thing overclocked to 1ghz. And, if they did, they could also do the same thing to overclock the 8800GTS. You called an extreme overclocker a lunatic? :eek: Well, yes... many are. :D In a good way.
But stock cooling alone gives some headroom for the casual tuner.

I'm not shure if you're an nV fan or not, but you can't deny the mathematical power and the potential of this GPU, even with these drivers, the 2900XT is getting good performance, and there's still much room for improvement.
Remeber the X1900 when it first was launched? The 8800? Compare their current performance to how well they were doing on release day.

EDIT: Hey look, it's 3DMark07 :p
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGkLLFut1Yo


Keep it civil or keep it to yourself. Name calling etc will not stand here...mmmkay?

Luta

[imposter]

hopefully they get a driver fix or something...

[jtjuska]

One thing that the R600 seems to have a big advantage over the GTS's is that it doesnt' seem to suffer hardly at all from AA at any resolution. So people who want their quality maxed all the time will definately want to be looking at these closer.

~jtjuska

[MadMan007]

Poor, sweet rainless, you chose the wrong person to cross paths with over the R600. Don't you know that arguing versus faith is useless? ;)

About drivers, it makes me wonder what AMD was doing all those months with the reworked silicon rather than writing the drivers for it. I'd have hoped they'd tweaked their drivers a lot already so it's surprising to see feature changes right at the release.

[Shell]

Sweet, sweet rainless, you chose the wrong person to cross paths with over the R600. Don't you know that arguing versus faith is useless? ;) I'm amazed Apple and nVidia have not merged with each other yet. ;)

Some more reviews rolled out...
OCW review: http://www.ocworkbench.com/2007/ati/ATI-HD-Radeon-HD-2900XT-and-HD-2000-Series/p1.htm
GURU3D: http://www.guru3d.com/article/Videocards/431/1/

The GURU did well.

[MadMan007]

The GURU3D article has to be one of the worst reviews for performance comparison I've ever read. Then again I haven't read one of theirs before :p Wth is up with randomly having different cards in each test for no apparent reason :confused:

[Hipcrostino]

Damn! Beat me to it!

And it is the 14th... somewhere overseas.

Edit: :drool: Damn that's nice GDDR3.

its the fourteenth in Australia!

[Audioaficionado]

...*EDITED*It's against the rules to flame anyone on OCForums. Please edit this so it's not a flame. If not then someone will do it for you.

TIA

[vixro]

I'm confused. Everyone is comparing FPS scores instead of IMAGE quality scores. The image quality from as far as I can remember has always been better on ATI. When turning up AA, AAA, and multisampling options the FPS stayed higher while showing a superior image quality. Nvidia has always had decreased scores with AA cranked to 6x. (Why test in 4x?)

[Mr. Cornell]

The HD2900XT seems to take a nose dive when actual texture filtering (read: anisotropic) needs to be done. Whoever designed the R600 architecture's TMUs needs to be shot. What's the point of new AA modes and 512-bit memory controller with 1024-bit ring bus when your core can't even apply anisotropic filtering without taking a 50% performance hit?

It's looking a lot like 8800GTX for me. Nvidia has always been about balanced performance it seems to me (we'll ignore the Geforce FX here), whereas ATI always finds a way to unbalance performance somewhere and ruin the potential of otherwise good hardware ideas.

[ViperJohn]

First post-NDA review AFAIK. 22 pages long, benchs, oc'ing, tons of pics.

http://www.vr-zone.com/?i=4946&s=1

Not really. The card Shimano had was an Engineering Sample not a production card.

Viper

[rainless]

http://img167.imageshack.us/img167/7524/1175321905411jn0.jpg

If it's trailing soo far behind... Then how is the 2900 benching to be closer to the 8800GTX in performance in many of the displayed benchmarks?
Well if that's such an issue for you; then why even bother with an 8800GTS 320Mb? :shrug: CPU - GPU, one is ahead of the other all the time.
What? Are you actually refering to the 2900's 320 units to the completely different architecture of the G80?
The 2900 was not made to tie with it's intended competition. ;)
You called an extreme overclocker a lunatic? :eek: Well, yes... many are. :D In a good way.
But stock cooling alone gives some headroom for the casual tuner.

I'm not shure if you're an nV fan or not, but you can't deny the mathematical power and the potential of this GPU, even with these drivers, the 2900XT is getting good performance, and there's still much room for improvement.
Remeber the X1900 when it first was launched? The 8800? Compare their current performance to how well they were doing on release day.

EDIT: Hey look, it's 3DMark07 :p
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGkLLFut1Yo

I'm not a "fan" of any piece of hardware. I don't LIKE ati, for personal reasons, but it's got nothing to do with the 2900XTs actual performance. (And just because I dont like ATI doesn't mean I "like" NVIDIA. I find it hard to respect anybody that could charge $800 for a card. But choosing the lesser of two evils...)

First you said, in the Cyber Deals thread I believe "The 2900XT can easily beat the 8800GTX just by moving one slider" but you never answered my question on what this *magical slider* is... you know... the "Beat 8800GTX" slider. Now you're saying it's closer to the 8800GTX in many benchmarks. It seems closer in a few SYNTHETIC benchmarks. But in what actual games is it closer to the 8800GTX?

http://enthusiast.hardocp.com/article.html?art=MTM0MSw4LCxoZW50aHVzaWFzdA==

And the CPU limitation isn't just an issue for me... it's an issue for EVERYBODY who doesn't have phase cooling and a quad core CPU. He took his quad core up to four and a half gigahertz. Maybe somebody out there has hit five already. But my point (not even just my point... but what I said and you completely ignored) is that, if the card is bottlenecked at the CPU, then it shall remain so. Because nobody's going to be pulling 8ghz out of a quadcore anytime soon.

And I'm not actually the one who originally called him a lunatic. I was thinking about buying an 8600 GTS and overclocking it to 1ghz, and somebody pointed out the fact that he was putting almost 1.8 volts through his card and that, for a normal user, the card would probably only last a week. Not to mention the fact that he also went through several modifications and attached a phase unit to get the 2600XT up to 1ghz.

Obviously I can't deny the 2900XTs potential. But what is certain, and will not change with driver updates is that it consumes a ridiculous amount of energy and puts out a ridiculous amount of heat. I've also heard the fan that it comes with is particularly noisy. This could eventually limit your overclock and heat your entire system if you don't come up with some ingenius method for heat dissipitation.

One of the primary things that's always turned me off to ATI has been power consumption. In an era where EVERYBODY is trying to consume less and less power (including more energy efficient power supplies, CPUs, GPUs, monitors, etc...) at each upgrade ATI has sought to consume MORE power. And I think that's wreckless and irresponsible. EDIT: It seems they've finally come to their senses with the 2600 and 2400 series:

The exciting feature about the Radeon HD 2600 and 2400 is their low power usage. At full load the quoted power consumption for the Radeon HD 2600 is 45W and with the Radeon HD 2400 it is 25W. In fact it was mentioned that at idle we could single digit wattage numbers on the Radeon HD 2400. Neither the Radeon HD 2400 nor Radeon 2600 require external auxiliary power.

here's hoping that the move to 65nm will make the 2900 more energy efficient.

You stack that against the fact that, for the moment at least, the performance is comparable to an 8800 GTS... which is both cheaper, cooler, and more energy efficient... and they've got a tough road to ho. I think it would be wiser for the enthusiast to wait until the 2900XT moves to the 65nm process and brings down energy consumption. It's going to look like a very bad deal six months from now.

http://enthusiast.hardocp.com/article.html?art=MTM0MSwxNSwsaGVudGh1c2lhc3Q=

On the previous gaming performance pages you will have likely noted that the 2900 XT did not perform up to a GeForce 8800 GTS level of testing. As you can see graphed above in active 3D loads, the 2900 XT consumed 50 watt to 90 watts more power than the GTS. And in every case the 2900 XT consumed more power, albeit sometimes miniscule differences, than the GeForce 8800 GTX which simply eclipses the 2900 XT in terms of gaming performance.

[rainless]

It's against the rules to flame anyone on OCForums. Please edit this so it's not a flame. If not then someone will do it for you.

TIA

Now that you mention that... I was offended by that. I thought we were talking about a video card, and he personally insulted me for no apparent reason.

[PhysX]

now all the 8800gtx owners can choke on it and finally stfu :P

[ViperJohn]

now all the 8800gtx owners can choke on it and finally stfu :P

I wouldn't bet on that lol.

Viper

[rainless]

now all the 8800gtx owners can choke on it and finally stfu :P


I'll never understand the Nintendo/ATI/AMD phenomena. What are the 8800GTX owners going to choke on exactly? It outperforms the 2900XT. And even if it didn't, why would the GTX owners care?

[Audioaficionado]

Fanboyism is like a fanatical religion or an extremely strong political view. Very few are ever converted and they will fight and attack anyone who insults their god or view.

Having the top hardware is an extension of their e-penus or other such need to feel more adequate.

But you know this already ;)

Edit:

[rainless]

Fanboyism is like a fanatical religion or an extremely strong political view. Very few are ever converted and they will fight and attack anyone who insults their god or candidate.

Having the top hardware is an extension of their e-penus or other such need to feel more adequate.

But you know this already ;)

Bah... I only had the top hardware once in my entire life: A Pentium II 300mhz with a Voodoo II SLI card. There weren't even any forums to brag about it on back then. (And that was probably the most short-lived combo of all time.)

I'd just like something to complete my nice C2D set-up. I'm very interested in these 45 watt 2600XTs... who knows when they'll be out though? Might have to wind up with an 8800GTS. Forget fanboyism... doesn't anybody ever think of price anymore? $329 after mail in rebate... sounds right to me.

[Audioaficionado]

...Forget fanboyism... doesn't anybody ever think of price anymore? $329 after mail in rebate... sounds right to me.I saw that one over at Newegg and it looks pretty good for a DX10 512MB card. It sounds like neither of us are benchmark junkies so that card would serve us very well.

If ATI can get a 65nm card out later this year that uses less power and they get better nix drivers, I might take another harder look at them.

I want a Q6600 once the price drops after Q3/H2 this year. I'll see if anything is left for a better card after that.

[PhysX]

I'll never understand the Nintendo/ATI/AMD phenomena. What are the 8800GTX owners going to choke on exactly? It outperforms the 2900XT. And even if it didn't, why would the GTX owners care?

well the way fan boys are today, they would care because its... ati and dx10 lol...

[rainless]

I saw that one over at Newegg and it looks pretty good for a DX10 512MB card. It sounds like neither of us are benchmark junkies so that card would serve us very well.

If ATI can get a 65nm card out later this year that uses less power and they get better nix drivers, I might take another harder look at them.

I want a Q6600 once the price drops after Q3/H2 this year. I'll see if anything is left for a better card after that.

I'm good with my CPU for another two or three years. That's why I want to get a really good video card now, so I don't even have to think about it for the next few years. Bioshock or whatever comes out... I'll have it covered. I only got the 7600GS because I had an EXTREMELY limited budget and... it was actually my dream card all those years I was stuck on AGP.

To me $400-$500 for a graphics card is completely insane. I got a friggin Xbox 360 for that... it's like a little computer... To run a GTX I'd need both $500 AND another $100+ for a new power supply. Now we're looking at a PS3.

No... once I have $500 to burn I'm going to buy a video projector. But first... I've got to buy a car.

[Audioaficionado]

My AGP -> PCIe upgrade was 6600GT to 7600GT. It's a nice card for now since I got it for only $90 after BFG sent me the $50 MIR check :D

I want the Quad for running SMP_FAH distributed clients. Otherwise a C2D is more than enough. I'll be interested in what else DAAMIT has that does DX10. When something decent IMHO drops below ~$250, I might go for it.